I started university again this week. Yes, I did. As busy as I am at work, or perhaps at work and in my free time as I am a bit of a workaholic, I have this innate need to always learn and grow. And because I am driven to succeed in my career, I felt it was important to start preparing for the next step – and so I began a part-time Professional Diploma in Management at the Dublin Business School.

On Wednesday, I had my first lecture, which I thought was a great start. We delved into leadership and particularly the differences between leadership and management.

It was an inspiring evening of learning and reflection for me that got me writing this blog post and creating the infographic on the differences between a leader and a manager below.

The key learning really is that leadership and management are fundamentally different, but they often need to go hand in hand.

Warren Bennis distinguishes both explaining that “To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion.” He also says that both are important.

After being away for two weeks – first at INBOUND15 in Boston, then at dmexco in Cologne – I had so many things  to take care of so I used my weekend to deal with some urgent emails and to catch up with my reading: there were about 350 unread articles among the 40 subscriptions that I have in my feedly.

I’ve managed to get down to 88 articles now, so this was a productive learning weekend.

Anyway, there were so many good articles which I thought would be useful for the other Channel Consultants in my team at HubSpot so I emailed them a list of 10 fantastic reading recommendations.

Then I thought, these articles would surely be of interest to my readers too and so I decided to share them with you as well. I hope you enjoy them and they inspire a powerful start to your working/study week.

10 Reading Recommendations to Power up Your Week:

#1: The Most Common Mistakes Companies Make with Global Marketing

This is some fantastic advice from our very own Nataly Kelly – our VP of Marketing Localisation at HubSpot – in the Harvard Business Review. The world may be going global, but local is super important in business. 

2002 – Friendster launches; 2003 – MySpace arrives; 2004 – here comes Facebook; 2005 – begins the YouTube era; 2006 – Twitter is here… The evolution of social media started 13 years ago.

Fast forward to 2015, social is no longer just a hype, however using social media in business is still a huge challenge for marketers.

But things seem to be changing.

This year’s Altimeter Group Social Business benchmark research uncovered something very interesting: For the first time, an important shift in priorities is happening – strategists are moving from scaling consumer engagement in social to making a larger enterprise-wide shift and integrating social across the entire business.

Isn’t this something that social media experts have been preaching to clients for years? Back in 2013 when I was doing my research on social media for sustainability, one of the main issues was that both social media and sustainability were treated as standalone disciplines within businesses, whereas they should be fully integrated throughout organisations.

So, why should you care?

PR agencies (and agencies in general) are notoriously known for not having the time to invest in their own PR or marketing activities but make their living out of advising and implementing such for clients.

If you are an agency owner or work in an agency, let me ask you some questions:

1. Do you blog?
2. Do you use social media?
3. Do you have a landing page on your site?
4. How much time do you invest in doing PR for your own agency?

Now, let me take a guess about your answers:

1. Hmm when we have time.
2. Yes, but mainly just to curate or share our own stuff.
3. No, no time for that and what’s the point.
4. We just don’t have time because we are swamped with client work.

You might be thinking, “Why do I even need any of that? We have our clients, our team is busy, we can’t invest time and money into something that won’t bring us much result.”

Yep, sure. For now you do. Do you think about the future, though?

Far too often I hear “We just didn’t have time to blog this month, there’s just so much going on with our clients.” 

This is the number 1 challenge for agencies –> we don’t have time for our own PR and marketing.

But that’s just wrong.

Over the past eight months, I’ve had many PR students contact me to ask for help or advice with their PR dissertation.

The majority of them seem to struggle to find a good topic for their dissertations, but quite a few also find it difficult to identify good resources to start with their research.

That’s why I thought it would be useful to share with you a list of books, blogs and resource banks I recommend for your research, topic brainstorm, literature review and, in general, to help you grow your knowledge in the field.

Some of these I’ve used for my own research – first on social media for PR, then on social media for sustainability. I've had some comments that some of these books might be a little outdated since the industry moves so fast, but I have purposefully included them because current graduates probably don't know how the industry used to be a few years back and it is essential that while doing their research they understand how exactly things have changed since then. 

I hope you find the list useful!

33 Resources for Your PR Dissertation: